HAPPY HAPPY BIRTHDAY to my niece, Khalia!! I am tremendously proud of you for all you've done to safely make it to 18.

Okay, so after spending the day with my friend, Lyall and her 9 year old daughter, I was thinking a great deal about the relationships women have with one another. Mothers and daughters. Sisters. Friends, etc.

It was this line of thinking that led me to write the poems that appear in this 29th book.

Then I had to come to grips with the fact that my printer really does not like me. I had to print so many copies of this book before I realized that I just wasn't going to be able to print it properly. On to Plan B!

The title page.

The first expansion.

So this is not a structure that I learned somewhere. It's actually a fold that I created one day playing around with paper and folding. I call it the expand and display structure because you start with one square and with each unfolding, you expand the content and display the book until it is fully expanded (see below).

Full expansion

I fought with my printer and it won. So I had to cut the pieces of the poems into squares and glue them onto the page. I'm fine with it, but I wish I had not wasted hours trying to format the text just right and then fiddling with the printer. But alas. It is done and the end result is pretty nice.